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Meta-Learning with Temporal Convolutions

Nikhil Mishra, Mostafa Rohaninejad, Xi Chen, Pieter Abbeel
(Submitted on 11 Jul 2017)

Deep neural networks excel in regimes with large amounts of data, but tend to struggle when data is scarce or when they need to adapt quickly to changes in the task. Recent work in meta-learning seeks to overcome this shortcoming by training a meta-learner on a distribution of similar tasks; the goal is for the meta-learner to generalize to novel but related tasks by learning a high-level strategy that captures the essence of the problem it is asked to solve. However, most recent approaches to meta-learning are extensively hand-designed, either using architectures that are specialized to a particular application, or hard-coding algorithmic components that tell the meta-learner how to solve the task. We propose a class of simple and generic meta-learner architectures, based on temporal convolutions, that is domain- agnostic and has no particular strategy or algorithm encoded into it. We validate our temporal-convolution-based meta-learner (TCML) through experiments pertaining to both supervised and reinforcement learning, and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods that are less general and more complex.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.03141